THERE IS NO PERFECT SOLIDARITY
An imperfect personal manifesto by Becca thomas on love in a time of genocide, written when I couldn’t sleep. This was originally written for a broadcast on No Bounds Radio in February 2024 on the theme of ‘devotion’.
On October 7th 2023, a genocide intensified. A year and 9 months before, I made a fool of myself speaking with Omar Hmidat – a community organiser, filmmaker and transdisciplinary researcher from Palestine – in The living room (also known as Al-Madafeh) at The Mosaic Rooms. As part of the Decolonizing Architecture Art Research’s (DAAR) Stateless Heritage exhibition, Al-Madafeh was a space of conviviality and generosity in the spirit of [the West Bank’s] Dheisheh refugee camp’s culture, for people to meet, discuss ideas and create solidarity. I had recently read Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed for the first time. I misquoted and bumbled over theory. I think I was trying to communicate how Friere says “dehumanisation, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny, but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanises the oppressed.”⚟
On October 30th 2023, back at The Mosaic Rooms, I was unable to speak up during an informal discussion on the topic of Solidarity with a group of practitioners who had been involved with Resolve Collective’s ‘Tools for Solidarity' project. Surrounded by art and social justice heavy-weights, my throat was constricted by the question: what the actual fuck do I know (about solidarity)? The best I could do was a diagram, drawn while listening to the conversation happening around me.
THE WORD SOLIDARITY DOES NOT SING AS LOUDLY FOR ME AS LOVE DOES
In 22 Moons by Ignota Books, Caspar Heinemann wrote that “THE ONLY TOPIC POTENTIALLY MORE EMBARRASSING TO WRITE ABOUT THAN ROMANTIC LOVE FOR A SPECIFIC OTHER IS NON-ROMANTIC LOVE FOR EVERY OTHER.” ⚚ In All About Love - New Visions, bell hooks writes that “audiences became agitated when she [sic] spoke about the place of love in any movement for social justice… love was for the naive, the weak, the hopelessly romantic.”❋
She went on to write about how “usually, fundamentalists, be they Christian, Muslim, or any faith, deny the unifying message of love that is at the heart of every major religious tradition” and how they “shape and interpret religious thought to make it conform to and legitimise a conservative status quo, justifying ‘imperialism, militarism, sexism, racism, homophobia”❋, and even genocide.
Fittingly, an ex-lover bought me my copy of bell hooks’ book All about Love. We took turns reading it to each other at bedtime during the first Covid-19 lockdown. Despite this, it was like I picked it up for the first time somewhere between the 7th and 30th of October 2023. The love that brought me the book did not go the distance because it was based on the premise of love as a feeling – not as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” – not as a “set of behaviors”⚷ – a mix of “care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”❋
I have been misguided for many years thinking that “feeling like it” is the sole prerequisite for love, for action – for showing up for myself and others. I am learning how.
In these interesting times, when unprecedented is the new normal, to choose love is to choose, as Daniella Valz Gen phrased it, “an initiation into the sacred labour of grief.”☽
Someone used the word “kernel” during the solidarity discussion at The Mosaic Rooms, and I was reminded of the archetype of apocalypse and how reconstitution or renewal is at the heart of it, or as I have repeated over and over for the past year, the seed of the new amidst the dying old ways. Angela Davis said that “we are living in the imaginaries of those long gone before us, [and] one day people will be living in the imaginaries we’ve created”. Some are calling it the new Age of Aquarius (iykyk). I choose to view apocalypse as an against the odds invitation to deepen your capacity – to choose to stay with the trouble – to grieve regeneratively.
The solidarity conversation drifted onto faceless and nameless art institutions and their myriad failings made stark yet again since October 7th, and before. Many justified frustrations expressed. AND, in staying with the trouble, let us avoid the trap of spending so long pointing out the wrongdoings of another – pleading with them to do right by us – that we do not spend enough time conspiring with and tending to the wellbeing of our own communities, even if against the odds.
bell hooks reminds us that “we can choose how we respond to acts of injustice. Taking responsibility means that in the face of barriers we still have the capacity to invent our lives, to shape our destinies in ways that maximise our well-being. Every day we practise this shape shifting to cope with realities we cannot easily change.”❋
Like seeds, we are the infinite nesting dolls of our ancestors, and we contain futures. What will we bloom? To choose “not this”⚑ - not borders, not imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, not fascist governments, not police, not prisons, not death making institutions – to choose “not this” is to choose a million experiments.
If you need proof that abolition can work, look at your friends. To quote from Radical Friends’ Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts, “friends are the original [Decentralised Autonomous Organisations]. To be friends is a relation autonomous from corporations or states, a fugitive association” and for this reason “our friendship networks may provide the best design patterns for social infrastructure: resilient and mutable systems for scale free interdependence and mutual aid.” ❍
Play and children and schools wrestled their way into the solidarity conversation and people spoke of young ones like we are not still them, somewhere deep, beaten down by “the inhuman claims placed upon us”⚷ by “the systems under which we live.” Now I am telling myself, I am telling myself, I am telling myself: if you have been to a good rave and soared illegal heights with friends you love - don’t tell me you don’t know how to play any more; don’t tell me you don’t know anything about solidarity; don’t tell me you don’t know how to show up.
LOVE IN A TIME OF GENOCIDE
LOVE IN A TIME OF GENOCIDE CALLS, beyond the heteronormative monogamous romcom feelgood disney paradigm – beyond your small patch of concrete – beyond spiritual bypassing – beyond bad boy intellectual realism that brands hope as delusional – beyond healing as navel gazing at your own trauma – beyond numbness and inaction. LOVE catalysed by grief (I am learning how, I am learning how, I am learning how)
Joshua Schrei speaks in The Emerald podcast:
“...in that honest searing recognition of the state of things, the mad seer offers something besides doom and dismay. They offer an immediacy, a rawness, an urgency through which love can actually pour through. An invitation to wake up to the reality of this humble existence - that life has always been the most precarious of propositions - in whose maddening play we have never exerted much of what can be called control.
But in the midst of all this, in the midst of the pain of a world determined to play out its cycles of anguish yet again, its victor and vanquished dramas again and again, a world determined to enact its own failings, its own miseries on another generation of children, again, in the midst of all this, we can wake up. We can try in whatever small seemingly insignificant ways to be conduits for love to pass through us. We can feed each other. We can be there for eachother and we can, together, echo the seers’ cry that proclaims to the overarching culture - wake up from your numbness. Wake up from your numbness - and feel. Feel. Wake up from your numbness and feel.”❧
I conclude where I began: I am often afraid, and I am often afraid to speak. With that in mind, I want to revise some things Paulo Freire said about fear in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
He wrote: “this individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled”'⚟ I write: THIS INDIVIDUAL IS AFRAID TO CONFRONT, TO LISTEN, TO SEE THE WORLD UNVEILED - BUT THEY DO IT ANYWAY.
He wrote: “this person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into dialogue with them.”⚟
I write: THIS PERSON IS AFRAID TO MEET THE PEOPLE [AND] TO ENTER INTO DIALOGUE WITH THEM - BUT THEY DO IT ANYWAY.
We write: “THIS PERSON DOES NOT CONSIDER [HERSELF] THE PROPRIETOR OF HISTORY OR OF ALL PEOPLE, OR THE LIBERATOR OF THE OPPRESSED; BUT [SHE] DOES COMMIT [HERSELF], WITHIN HISTORY, TO FIGHT AT THEIR SIDE” ⚟- however she can, however imperfectly.
Join. There is no perfect solidarity. bell hooks “looked for a deeper, more complex understanding of the word ‘perfect’ and found a definition emphasising the will ‘to refine’.” There is no ‘perfect’. Show up anyway; try, and learn how.
⚟ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (London: Penguin Random House, 1970).
⚚ Caspar Heinemann, ‘The Devil’ in 22 Moons (London: Ignota Books, 2022)
❋ bell hooks, all about love: new visions (New York: HarperCollins, 2001)
⚷ Jessica Dore, Tarot for Change (London: Hay House, 2021)
☽ Daniella Valz Gen, An initiation into the sacred labour of grief (Online: lo intermitente, Substack, 2023)
⚑ Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy (London: Robinson, 1967)
❍ Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty (ed.), Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts (London: Torque Editions, 2022)
❧ Joshua Schrei, For the Intuitives (Part 2) (Online: The Emerald Podcast, 2023)
